It's difficult for people of my generation to separate GoldenEye the film from GoldenEye the computer game. The 1997 Nintendo shoot-em-up was so aggressively brilliant it had its own pandemic addiction dream: everything pixelated and seen beyond the jutting snout of an AK-47 assault rifle. I suffered from it, on and off, for months; I know others did too. But for a moment let's pretend GoldenEye the game never existed – take yourself, gamers of the late 90s, to that dark place. GoldenEye the film was a smasher, and for me a franchise peak.

It introduced us to a new James Bond, the fifth, first met wearing a baggy black playsuit and running along the top of a dam. Where were we? Hundreds of feet above a Soviet munitions factory. A swan dive, a bungee rope, and a grappling-hook gun with laser cutter attachment got our agent inside. We didn't get a good look at him until he crawled into a communal toilet to waylay a henchman. "Sorry," he purred, the accent faintly Irish, a tanned and leathery face coming into view, "forgot to knock." It was Pierce Brosnan! Only just holding back a smile, and quipping while he clobbered enemies exactly as Bond should. (For comparison we first glimpsed Timothy Dalton as 007, in 1987's The Living Daylights, playing paintball in Gibraltar. Literally his first close-up involved getting frightened by a monkey.)

GoldenEye's pre-credit sequence never let up. Bond met another 00 agent, played by Sean Bean, and watched – guh – as his pal was shot in the head. Next he evaded a militia by driving a motorbike off a cliff. Between cliff-top and cliff-bottom, he somehow commandeered a plane. The film was only minutes old, and already there were so many outrageous action scenes to deconstruct with friends. The big-casino voice of Tina Turner sung over the credits. There'd been one-liners, gadgets, wasted vehicles, inept communists ...

And this is how we're best off rating Bond films, I think – by check-box. Does this or that instalment have a cool pre-credit sequence? Are you able to give the theme song a passable rendering in the shower without re-Googling the lyrics? Does the baddie have a lair? Is there a memorable assistant villain? How plausible is Bond's feature-length pairing with an attractive female civilian? How shocking the inevitable moment of his betrayal (by friend, helper, squeeze)? Does he do something strenuous, dirty or violent and still remain immaculate in a suit? Does he notch more air miles than a golf pro, and desecrate the local architecture in at least one famous city?

By these major criteria and by many other minor ones – the sort that operate on an almost subliminal level of Bond-movie gratification – GoldenEye was immediately a winner for me. Its plot took 007 from Russia to Monte Carlo, back to St Petersburg and then to the Cuban jungle. St Petersburg got the worst of it. Bond, joy-riding in a tank, spent six expensive minutes smashing the place to pieces. Playing cards in Monte Carlo he encountered a cigar-smoking murderess with a cartoon-y name, Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen), several times a threat to his life. Strapped into a helicopter that was programmed to fire missiles at itself – an absolute classic in the sub-category of the needlessly elongated death sentence – Bond met a much nicer girl, Izabella Scorupco's Natalya, who wore sensible clothes. His chief antagonist had an Evil Train, and the train had a special Bond-murdering carriage. Of course this baddie had a lair.

Who was the baddie? Here factored the betrayal. It was Bean, shot in the head in the film's early minutes, but still alive, and returned to torment Her Majesty's Secret Servant because as a secret Russian he secretly hated England. Bean, in the character of Alec Trevelyan, got all the best lines: florid and doomed boasting, plus taunts about Bond's easy womanising and his capacity for unfeeling henchman-genocide over the years. He conjured an image of a possible funeral for 007, "a small memorial service, with only Moneypenny and a few tearful restaurateurs in attendance". Yes!

The film is not perfect. Product placement reached unprecedentedly squalid levels, with Bond regularly brandishing his Omega Seamaster to no purpose, and in the chase scene driving his tank through a branded stack of mineral water. The two principals sometimes got into trouble with their RP; Co Louth-born Brosnan at one point rendering "Come on! Now!" as "Camah! Nargh-uh!", and Yorkshire's Bean so intent on being menacingly posh he kept saying "Jems" for "James". The film's sexual politics were, of course, confused. Heroine Natalya, presented as a firebrand who could look after herself, hack computers, load a semi automatic, etc, had an unfunny running joke in which she nagged Bond for not being chivalrous enough. And in one scene a torrent of bullets deflected, with ping noises, off a chain-link fence.

But I can forgive it. GoldenEye is the best Bond, confirmed by its superiority in the most important category of all, the lavishness of the villain's execution. Sean Connery ensured that Auric Goldfinger, in 1964, got sucked out of an aeroplane window. Roger Moore condemned Hugo Drax, in 1979's Moonraker, to a lonely death in space. In GoldenEye, Brosnan's Bond dropped Bean's Trevelyan many hundred feet on to concrete. The fall was not quite fatal for the villain – until a satellite the size of a tennis court landed on him. Pointy-end first. Aflame. Bean got in a last hopeless scream while Brosnan exited the scene, dangling from the bottom of a helicopter, his girl at the controls.

Within the limits of the Bond universe, this was actual poetry.

Best line: Trevelyan [challenged by Bond about his motives]: "Oh, please, James! Spare me the Freud. I might as well ask you if all the vodka martinis ever silence the screams of all the men you've killed. Or if you find forgiveness in the arms of all those willing women for all the dead ones you failed to protect."

Best gadget: Bond's ballpoint pen – also a "class four grenade", armed by pushing its clicky top three times. Used to devastating effect, late on, in a massacre of computer programmers at the baddie's lair.

• This article was amended on 26 September. We originally said that Timothy Dalton's first Bond film was Licence to Kill, instead of The Living Daylights. This has been corrected.